because life is too short
by John Murphy The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is self-indulgent in the best and worst sense. Peter Jackson, the hobbity Kiwi who transformed J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, into an Oscar-winning box-office behemoth, has earned his right to luxuriate in the cinematic world he began building over a decade ago. And [...]
St. Augustine once famously commented that singing a hymn is like “praying twice.” I’m no theologian, and am therefore ill-equipped to proffer a theological explanation for the case; but my heart tells me that it is so. For there are songs, sacred songs, hymns, prayers put to music, that are so beautiful, that our hearts [...]
I love beautiful print books, books that you can fondle and flip through, and see how the light plays on a page. Publishing beautiful print books is part of our mission and business over yonder at Idylls Press. (The other part being beautiful, and entertaining websites.) But I also believe that ebooks are the best [...]
Here’s a music video directed by STGS contributor, John Murphy, for Portland-based electronic shoegaze outfit, Pinscape. Inspired by Clan Murphy fave, Picnic at Hanging Rock, the video emulates the atmospheric ambience and cavernous reverb of the single, Letropa. Check out Pinscape’s 7-track EP, Transitory Timing, for some moody electronic dreampop. Shot in the Rogue [...]
Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder appreciated by John Murphy Martin Scorsese directing a Merchant-Ivory film? Don’t be fooled. Period trappings aside, this is a Marty movie through and through — beautifully filmed, expertly acted, and thematically obsessed with guilt, passion, and moral failings. I’m in an admitted minority in finding The Age [...]
My middle child is “high-functioning” autistic. One of the (many) interesting things about him is that he gets little “obsessions”—fierce interests in certain, often obscure, subjects that can last for months, even years. Around the time of his eighteenth birthday, my son’s obsession-du-jour was 1990s Westerns, a subgenre of a classic genre (Westerns) which has [...]
appreciated by Debra Murphy From the back cover of the Idylls Press edition, illustrated by John Murphy: “Originally published in 1908, G.K. Chesterton’s nightmare-fantasy of Police vs. Dynamiters, Law vs. Anarchy, and Religion vs. Nihilism has influenced writers as diverse as Franz Kafka and C.S. Lewis, and remains as exuberant and imaginative, as original and [...]
Today I’m taking a look at the recenty released FPS (“first person shooter”) game, Battlefield 3. So far the majority of the gaming community is loving this game, and I agree. I’ll break down this review in several parts to describe the whole game, starting with the campaign. Campaign A campaign is basically the single [...]
appreciated by Debra Murphy Wussies of the World, Unite I’ve never been a huge fan of the vampire story. As a youngster, I relished the shivers to be had from the old Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee movies that played on television. (Back in Champaign-Urbana, where I grew up, there was a regular Late Show [...]
Daniel Deronda, a BBC TV production based on the novel by George Eliot,1 is a story set in Victorian London. A rich, selfish woman named Gwendolen Harleth (played by Romola Garai) falls in love with a kind, gentle man named Daniel Deronda (Hugh Dancy). But for reasons of money, she marries a snotty fellow named Henleigh [...]
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